The second argument usually goes like this: yes, women were necessary to tantric rites, but only as vehicles for male attainment. They were conduits of power, vehicles that males used to obtain especially potent magical powers. However, outside the limited sphere of the rite, their importance dwindled.4 In this view women’s own attainment of spiritual power does not actually figure in the image of women.
These views certainly portray accurately a specific body of tantric literature, especially in works produced several centuries earlier and in different locations than the f ifteenth- to eighteenth-century texts I focus on here.5 However, we find even in these earlier texts an alternative view—including, for instance, an acknowledgment of women’s special capacity to perfect mantras, and a reassessment of the status of women. This reassessment extends both to ordinary women and beyond the limited time and space of the rite.
It is important to stress that my sources are textual. So, to frame this use of textual sources, we should keep in mind that just as the Kl of the twenty-first-century West is in some respects an imagined construction proliferating especially through written words on the I nternet, so what we address here are texts and, as such, are simply claims by these tantric writers about how one should respond to women. Given that this is the case, it is beyond the purview of the evidence to make claims regarding the actual historical behavior of women or male tantric practitioners. We can only recover a semblance of the “what really happened” through the refractory lens of the text, and we also need to keep in mind that the views presented here only form one element in what is otherwise an unwieldy and often contradictory potpourri of practices and views in these texts.
In conjunction with this lack of other substantive forms of evidence of social practice, I use the terms “subject” and “agency” here not to designate some sort of “real” or existentially autonomous entity, for there are considerable philosophical and cultural problems entailed in as signing these notions to a non modern non-Wester n context. Nor does my use of these terms assume a sovereign, intact self that exists prior to any relation to a world outside itself. I use these terms instead to point to textual portrayals that signify a slippery but rhetorically and grammatically effective and prevalent category. That is, the refractory lens we employ as we read this mediated form of evidence allows us to talk about “subjects” and “agency” if we keep in mind that these are relational terms located within a textual assertion of identities. In this sense the “subject” we describe here is a grammatical instance of a representation of woman. With this I draw from and modify Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan’s (1993: 12) suggestion that we move away from a notion of agency as a “performative intentionality” toward one of functionality within a social network.
Even given these limitations, these textual sources help us to reconstruct indirectly an alternative picture of women, especially since they present such a striking contrast to what we find elsewhere in textual representations of women in Hinduism. So, for instance, we find clear textual references to female gurus (NST 5.70, GST 2.18ff), something not present even in earlier Tantras such as the Kulacmai Tantra (KCT) or the Kulrava Tantra (KuT), from which some of these eight texts borrow extensively, let alone in a more normative Hindu text such as Manu’s Dharma Sastra. This difference, which recognizes living women as venerable, may be read as representing a shift in attitudes toward women as a class. I would suggest that we understand the Kl Practice as a form of representation whose value perhaps lies most strongly in its historical worth as a reference to the propagation of discourse. These texts reflect the emergence of a discourse addressing social relations between the genders, and I suggest that its importance lies in the challenge, as discourse, that it presents to normative classifications. But this essay also strives to propose an intersubjective engagement with these fifteenth- to eighteenth-century texts to see what they might offer us today for rethinking our own categories of gender. For example, for Western women today, Rachel McDermott (1996: 291) notes that “the symbolism of Kl offers healing in a male-dominated world,” a trend that she sees expanded on some fronts via the new Internet culture (2003: 276ff). In a variety of ways this twenty-first-century Western image of Kl appears constructed out of thin air. Yet this use of Kl may not be entirely inconsistent with the advocacy of respect toward women that we find in the Kl Practice. These texts also offer us, in the twenty-first-century West, unexpected ways of looking at gender—for example, the notion discussed later of woman as one of five types of categories instead of two (male and female).
In the rest of the essay, I first look briefly at what comprises the Kl Practice and at the texts that present the Kl Practice. Following this, I address the notion of the gender binary and an alternative model present in these texts. I then discuss different elements of the Kl Practice as well as specific instances where women are represented in venerable positions, as proficient with mantras, and as gurus. Finally I conclude with evidence that suggests the model for understanding the veneration of women in these texts finds a parallel in the veneration of the Brahmin.
THE KL PRACTICE
This particular form of tantric praxis prescribes “left-handed” tantric rites, including those that focus on women, and is named variously in the texts as the “Kl Practice” (Kl sdhand), the “Great Mantra Practice” (mahmantrasdhana), the “Chinese Way” (cncra), and, more rarely, the kta Conduct” (ktcra). The “Chinese Way” is the most common expression used in these texts. This is not to suggest that this nomenclature in any way indicates actual Chinese practice. This last expression—cncra—sometimes translated as the “Tibetan method” (Goudriaan and Gupta, 1981: 153)—looks suspiciously like a species of medieval “Orientalism” where a repressed exoticism and eroticism is, within official discourse in the space of the written text, displaced and projected outward onto someone else, in this case onto the neighboring Chinese. We might find a contemporary example of this, in V. V. Dvivedi’s 1978 Sanskrit introduction to the aktisanjjama Tantra, where he notes that the description of the “Chinese Way” (cncra) approximates Muslim practice. He tells us, in Sanskrit, “here the Chinese bath and bowing resembles the action of namaz, [daily practice] following along with the Muslim religion.”6
For the sake of convenience I will refer to this practice throughout as the Kl Practice. This nomenclature is preferable to “The Chinese Conduct/Way” or “The Tibetan Way,” even though the praxis is most frequently named this in the texts, since so much of Chinese and Tibetan tantric practices do not in the slightest resemble this particular praxis, and it would be confusing and misleading to label this practice with a contemporary national identity. The “Great Mantra Practice” and the “kta Conduct” are also not as frequently used to name this praxis as is Kl Practice, and since the essence of the practice revolves around the worship of primarily three female goddesses—Kl, the Blue Goddess of Speech, and Tr—taking this particular name from the texts captures the general impetus of the praxis best.
Five key elements make up the Kl Practice. I list these here. Due to space constraints, all five are not addressed here, although I do address them elsewhere (Biernacki, 2007).
1. The practice centers on women and stresses seeking out women and treating them with respect.
2. The practice is especially a mental practice; therefore, none of the ordinary rules for time, place, or purity apply.
3. The Kl Practice is a rite that involves the worship of women, frequently incorporating the rite of sexual union, but at times simply limited to the worship of living women without including the rite of sexual union, particularly in the case of the worship of a young girl (kumr pj), where sex is not included.
4. The praxis involved in the Kl Practice explicitly goes beyond the limited time and place of the rite. The attitude of reverence and respect toward women should be maintained constantly, twenty-four hours a day. I suspect this particular rule is especially important in ritually habituating an attitude, which shifts the position of women and t
he relation to women, in contrast to what we see in an earlier text such as the Kulrnava Tantra, where after the conclusion of the rite, normative hierarchies are reinstated, both with respect to gender and caste.
5. Finally, in the Kl Practice, the goddess is viewed as embodied in living women. It is not simply that women who are worshipped in the rite are considered divine, but rather that women as a category are revered, whether worshipped individually or not. Further, as a category, women get assimilated to Brahmins. Structurally, this last point in particular is key to the shift these texts present for women.
SOURCES
The texts consulted for this study include especially the (1) Bhannla Tantra (BT), a long text published in 1984 and based in part on an earlier and shorter published version entitled the Nla Tantra (NT)7; (2) Cncra Tantra (CT); (3) Gandharva Tantra (GT); (4) Gupta Sdhana Tantra (GST); (5) My Tantra (MT); (6) Nlasaraswat Tantra (NST); (7) Phetkri Tantra (PhT); and (8) oni Tantra (YT). They are all Sanskrit tantric texts; that is, texts titularly self-identified as Tantras and containing explicitly tantric elements also found in other tantric texts, such as ritual prescriptions, discussion of the six tantric acts,8 and an emphasis on mantras. They are also generally classified as tantric texts in the extant scholarship (Goudriaan and Gupta, 1981; Kaviraj, 1972). They present an uncommon attitude toward women typically not found elsewhere in classical Hindu texts, such as Manu’s Dharma stra and Vedic Sanskrit texts,9 and not common in a variety of other tantric texts either.
These texts also share a number of formal features, suggesting that we understand them in terms of a particular historical movement. They are all from approximately the same historical period and geographic region.10 Furthermore, they all include some mention of left-handed tantric practice, that is, the ritual inclusion of the five transgressive substances known as the five “m’s,”11 including liquor and a form of the rite of sexual union. Most of them consider the pilgrimage site of Kmkhya in Assam to be of preeminent importance. Additionally, one particular verse is replicated across several texts within this genre, but I have not come across the verse elsewhere either in general Hindu sources or in general kta sources, such as the Dev-Mhtmya,12 or elsewhere among Hindu tantric sources— and not even in much earlier tantric sources such as the KCT or the KuT, from which some of these eight texts borrow extensively. Given this verse’s repetition across several texts, and that many of these texts borrow from older sources, what is probably most interesting is the singular absence of this verse elsewhere among older Hindu tantric sources, and particularly its absence in other “left-handed” tantric texts not from this time period. This verse reads, “Women are gods, women are the life breath,” and while the verse is not reproduced in all of the texts consulted here, it nevertheless encapsulates and nearly always accompanies, when it is found, the other elements of the Kl Practice that we find in these eight texts. Also with some variation, and greater or lesser frequency, the same goddesses keep reappearing. Particularly important are Kl, Nlasaraswat (the Blue Goddess of Speech), and Tr/Tri.
One more point of interest is that none of these texts have been translated yet into English, or any other European language, but all of them have been published. Several have been published multiple times; for instance, the Bhannla and its earlier version, the Nla Tantra, has been published five times since the 1880s, and the Gandharva Tantra four times. That none are manuscripts suggests that at least for an indigenous audience they have been considered important enough to merit space on the printed page—and from a publisher’s point of view, an expectation of an audience in India interested in buying these texts, an expectation voiced also in the eminent tantric scholar V. V. Dvivedi’s (1996: 1) mention of the popularity (lokapriyat) of several of these texts.13
BINARIES
The dialogue between iva and Prvat presented earlier frames gender in terms of a binary. This model probably originally derives from the well-known classical cosmological and philosophical system of Skhy, with its notion of male spirit (purua) and female matter/ Nature (prakti). In the model here, male and female are two elements of a binar y, and this not ion of a binar y per vades these texts. However, working against this notion of a binary, we also find inscribed within these texts a separate, different model of the relation of women to men, one that constructs women as comparable to a particular caste. In this case women are not the lesser member of a binary, but rather, one group among several.
In some ways the notion of caste appears to be just as fundamental a division to Indian society as the gender divide. A contemporary anthropologist, Anjali Bagwe (1995: vi), titled a recent book, Of Woman Caste, where she draws from current colloquialisms that represent women as a caste group. Apart from this, a designation of women as akin to one of the castes is something we find elsewhere in Sanskrit texts, as early as the Vedas, where we find women lumped in with the lowest of the four castes, the servants (dras) (Jamison, 1996: 261). In the earlier, classical representations, the primary division among humans has to do with which caste one belongs to. In this context all women and some men get grouped into this lowest class of persons, the servants. So in terms of ritual praxis, women are not treated as members of the caste to which their (blood) father or male guardian belong, but rather as a whole group they are treated as members of the lowest caste of males.
In contrast, the suggestion we find here instead is that women as a group form a separate caste apart from the lowest servant caste and that this special caste of women ought to be treated more like Brahmins than like dras (the lowest ritual, social, and economic group). This grouping does not take into account differences between women, just as it does not take into account differences between Brahmins. In this configuration, women as a class, like Brahmins, warriors, and so forth, possess innate capacities that elevate their status as a whole class. When a text extols women’s competence with mantras and advocates respecting them, women here begin to move up, just as, historically, redefining the collective identity of a particular caste subgroup facilitated an upward move a long the continuum of the caste system for that group. Again, notably, we find here that in certain respects, the treatment accorded women—as a class—at some places in these texts parallels that of the highest caste, the Brahmin.
From our own view in the twenty-first-century West, perhaps the most salient element of this reconfiguration is that it affords a competing model of gender difference. While it certainly elides the undoubtedly real differences of status and wealth between different women, nevertheless, the presence of an alternative model that classifies women as one group among several presents an alternative to the nearly universal construction of women as the second sex, the perennially inferior member of a gender binary. So the view here is not like one particularly common and dominant view found in America, where the means of overcoming the gender binary is through an emphasis on the individual. In the American case the individual is of primary significance, and consequently, gender is a contingent and secondary category assigned to the individual, and one capable of being transcended. Indeed, it is frequently argued that we ought to transcend gender as a category in order to achieve the goals of equality. This blanket equality of the individual is a different model than the model of women as one group among several.
Nor is the difference that gender makes in this alternative model like the one postulated in some forms of French feminism,14 which is still modeled on a duality based on gender essentialism—although, as I note earlier, we also f ind more commonly a binar y model in these texts that encodes an essentialist gender binary. Neither do these texts propose a binary that then also allows space for a third neuter gender, though this is common enough in Indian texts elsewhere. Rather, in this particular alternative model, women are one group among five, which include Brahmins, warriors, merchants, servants, and women. The groups are generally hierarchically ordered with Brahmins at the top and servants at the bottom; women in this case form a fifth and are likened to the Brahmins rather than being lumpe
d in with servants.
Social classification often implies a social functionality, and this functionality typically encodes hierarchies of value. Setting women off as one group among several affords a reconsideration of their social functionality, one that in this case shifts their social value as a class. That the classification includes more than three is important because it tends to diffuse relationships away from an oppositional model, something that a number of scholars have noted (e.g., Prokhovnic, 1999).
Both models, the binary one and the one that postulates women as one category among several, operate throughout these texts. A binary model is certainly much more pervasive in general. On the other hand, the presence of a competing model helps to circumvent the familiar and inherently problematic dialectic of the binary, which unfolds as center/margin, self/other (male/female, mind/body, and so forth). The writers of these texts do not try to integrate these two different models. No authorial voice notices the disjunction between these separate models. They coexist without comment.
On the other hand, an alternative model of women as one of five groups offers ways of thinking about gender that a view of two precludes. It offers a view that by its contrast may shed light on our own twenty-first-century understandings of gender. While this Indian model appears to still incorporate an essentialist model of women, which does not account for differences between women, nevertheless it does offer a move away from an idea of gender as a binary, which in turn affords a structural problematization of the idea of woman as the other of maleness.
Woman and Goddess in Hinduism Page 16